Gloria Vanderbilt: the grand dame of New York society

Late last month, Gloria Vanderbilt, the 85-year-old grande dame of New York society, was too weary to receive visitors from the press. Several parties to promote the launch of her debut erotic novel, Obsession, suggest one reason why. A scan through the pages suggests another.

At an age when most dowagers are obsessing about Italian gardens, Pekineses or rare-breed chickens, Vanderbilt is enthusiastically fixated on sex. The book is a page-turner, each scene packed with new descriptions of a mistress's obsession with her lover's pleasure.

'I will be carrying only a single match but that match will find its way to your body's middle, where, even as you sleep, you are thinking of me as I make my honey. It's as if that match is a bee that needs to suck your c**k so much it could find it, hidden though it is, in the world's largest city.' Excuse me?

The New York Times says Vanderbilt's book 'may be the steamiest book ever written by an octogenarian'; the novelist Joyce Carol Oates calls it 'a remarkable tapestry of human passion'. Taking inspiration from Pauline Reage's classic erotic tale of the 1950s, Story of O, reviewers have been happy to describe Obsession as erotica, but are also careful to note that scenes involving lacquered dildos and garden carrots, whips, silken cords, golden nipple clamps, or when the mistress of the tale, Bee, beats her master's bottom 'piggy-pink', are borderline comic. 'A lot of it's meant to be funny,' Vanderbilt told New York magazine.

Still, it's safe to assume that when it comes to sex, Gloria Vanderbilt, daughter of railroad heir and chronic alcoholic Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt and great-greatgranddaughter of the legendary railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, the tenth richest man in history, knows whereof she speaks. Over the years, Gloria Vanderbilt has been an heiress, a wife, a mistress, a painter, an impresario of jeans and linens, a novelist, a poet and now a writer of steamy fiction.

As 'Little Gloria', she was at the centre of a notorious custody battle in the 1930s in which her paternal aunt, the very rich and severe Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, won custody of her, aged ten, after accusing Gloria's mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, of being an unfit parent. Along with the shocking revelation that Little Gloria's mother was the alleged lesbian lover of the Marchioness of Milford Haven, the girl's nurse described with 'virtuous relish' that Gloria Sr was 'a cocktail-crazed dancing mother, a devotee of sex erotica, and the mistress of a German prince'.

(Above) Gloria Vanderbilt in 2007, aged 83

That sealed the deal. Little Gloria went off to live with her aunt in New York, only to escape, seven years later, to Hollywood where she soon married an agent, Pasquale 'Pat' DiCicco, who spent their wedding night drinking and gambling and later took to beating her up.

After their divorce, Gloria married the British-born conductor Leopold Stokowski, a ladies' man who'd been the lover of Greta Garbo, and who was known for the sumptuous sound of his orchestral arrangements - he conducted the soundtrack to Disney's Fantasia. When that marriage failed, Gloria took up abstract painting on the advice of a psychiatrist, and moved on to Sidney Lumet (director of Dog Day Afternoon and Network). Her fourth and final husband was Mississippi writer Wyatt Cooper, with whom she had two sons, the CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper and Carter, who died in 1988.

But reviewers have tended to focus on her lovers as inspiration for Obsession. Vanderbilt helpfully detailed many of them in a previous book, It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir, in which she described 13 affairs, among them dalliances with Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly and Douglas Fairbanks Jr, plus a onenight stand with Marlon Brando, who kept a large portrait of himself in the bedroom.

'Marlon was, of course, just the man of the moment, such a great actor and so handsome and so mysterious, but so boring,' she remarked. 'He projected such sensitivity and all that, but I don't really think he was that sensitive.' Then came, Gloria wrote, 'maybe ten more'.

'Sex was something that really saved me. I mean, it gave me a sense of self. I had very low selfesteem. No confidence at all. And the minute boys came into the picture, it absolutely changed my life.'

(Right) Gloria with husband Leopold Stokowksi in 1959

It's also fair to say that Gloria has surprised her friends with this steamy late-life burst of erotic adventuring. Some weren't so certain about her book. She says two friends - 'very WASPy, even more WASPy than I am' - warned that the book would ruin her reputation. 'I refrained from saying, "Oh, goody!"' she added. If it's attention Vanderbilt desires, she's certainly got it: the book was described as 'elegant, unadulterated smut' by the New York Post.

Diane von Furstenberg, the designer and wife of former Paramount Studios chief Barry Diller, who threw a party to launch the book in Manhattan, says simply, 'It brought me back to when I was in boarding school in England, hiding under my covers reading Story of O.'

Obsession's story is straightforward: Priscilla, an uptight Manhattan society wife, discovers that her late husband, Talbot, had a long, erotic affair with a younger woman, a kind of sexual slave, named Bee. While Priscilla had been dutifully organising dinners and faking orgasms for years, her husband and his lover had been exploring more exciting worlds in their Xanadu-like retreat in the Californian countryside. The other woman possessed 'the living, vibrant, passionate, sexual side of Talbot'.

Priscilla is defeated, knowing that the mistress, not the wife, has won. She quotes Ninon de l'Enclos, the 17th-century Parisian courtesan and mistress of highly placed men, including Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, and the writer La Rochefoucauld: 'One needs a hundred times more esprit in order to love properly than to command armies.'

In her quest, Priscilla seeks out Bee and the slim tome climaxes, so to speak, at a masked ball at the fictitious Janus Club in a Brooklyn townhouse. 'It's sensual, poetic, erotic - very,' Gloria offered before publication. 'It's about two women who are obsessed with the same man, and then they become obsessed with each other. It's wild.'

Vanderbilt was recently asked why she wrote it. She replied: 'Susan Sontag [the feminist intellectual author] said something that has always fascinated me. She said that her novels don't exist as ideas in her head. They exist only as they are written. I was just ready to write this book. The gun sort of went off and it fell on the page, almost as if I was channelling it.'

The book's success has placed Gloria in the running to become a spokeswoman on several sexual issues, including not faking orgasms, which she admits she's done - 'but not recently'. If she's got a boyfriend at the moment, she's keeping quiet about it. Until his death in 2006, she was romantically linked to Gordon Parks, the civil rights era photographer and director of Shaft (1971).

(Left) Gloria with husband Sidney Lumet in 1962

Last month, Vanderbilt reflected on her love life: 'Growing up, so many of us really got a sense of ourselves through the man that we were married to, and that's very sad. I did an interview with Diane [von Furstenberg] after the party, and we were asked, "Is it better to be a maîtresse or a wife?" And we both together said, "Maîtresse!"'

Of course, Vanderbilt has had much to live up to as her era's foremost 'poor little rich girl'. No family name speaks more clearly of wealth, privilege and dissolution than Vanderbilt. In the late 1840s, as the recent biography The First Tycoon: the Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt noted, 'almost everyone who travelled between New York and Boston took a Vanderbilt boat or a Vanderbilt train'.

In the typical fashion, Cornelius, founder of the fortune - 'American capitalism's original sinner', according to The New York Times - lived modestly. A contemporary described him as 'a man of striking individuality, as straight as an Indian, standing six feet in his stockings and weighing about 200lbs'. According to his biographer TJ Stiles, Vanderbilt was frugal and abstemious but had one vice: the constant presence of a lit or unlit cigar.

His descendants were less restrained and took the opportunity to spend lavishly: on the arts, on fabulous houses, on stables of the finest thoroughbreds, on yachts, motor racing, funding foreign projects (in 1895, Consuelo Vanderbilt, judged to be one of the fairest and richest heiresses of the Golden Age, married the ninth Duke of Marlborough; Consuelo had no interest in the duke, and is said to have stood at the altar weeping behind her veil); they gambled, womanised and drank heavily.

The great New Deal economist and author of The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith, once said the Vanderbilts showed both the talent for acquiring money and dispensing with it in unmatched volume, adding that they frittered away their wealth on frequent and unparalleled self-gratification and very often did it with downright stupidity.

Contemporary generations have proved less colourful, though New York social commentators predict that one of the family's youngest heiresses, Madeleine Vanderbilt, 19, will emerge forcefully on the New York circuit. But like the Astors, almost all their property has gone and their great Robber Baron mansions on Fifth Avenue have been turned into museums.

(Right) Gloria with husband Wyatt Cooper in 1972

For Gloria, the path has been winding but never too steep to lose her foothold. She can lay claim to originating the enduring fashion for designer denim. In the early 1970s she went into business with Warren Hirsh, the fashion marketing genius who came up with the idea of glamorising American jeans. Vanderbilt put her swan logo and signature on the pocket, altered the cut and tapered the leg to fit the WASP ideal - her own shape presumably - and sold millions of pairs, making herself another fortune into the bargain. Hirsh had approached Jackie Onassis and the Rockefellers to endorse the idea, but it was Gloria who accepted and forced herself to overcome her shyness to promote the brand.

Jeans were just the beginning; there was a collection of scarves adapted from her paintings, then a line of blouses, perfume, sheets, shoes, leather goods, liqueurs and accessories. In 1985, she launched a tofu-based frozen pudding. By 1990 the brand was in decline and Vanderbilt sued her former lawyer and business manager, claiming that he was in cahoots with her psychiatrist and that they had between them stolen $2 million. Taxes were due and Vanderbilt was forced to sell her Southampton summer home and Manhattan townhouse to meet the demand.

For all the drama of her life, Vanderbilt herself remains oddly veiled. 'There has always been a vulnerable, childlike quality about her,' one friend told People magazine in 1985. 'She has had despair and aloneness, and maybe as a result she has terminal narcissism. A whole slice of her is a dreamy child... Sometimes she can hardly speak, she is so shy. But when something interests her she may get on a run and bore you to death about a great piece of lace or something.'

Nowadays Vanderbilt lives in Beekman Place, one of the finest blocks in Manhattan. She has a studio downstairs where she makes her art, and a bedroom full of videos of her son's reporting highlights. Tragically, Anderson's deeply depressed brother, Carter, committed suicide by jumping from a 14th-floor window in front of his mother.

In contrast to his mother, Anderson Cooper avoids discussing his private life, citing a desire to protect his neutrality as a journalist and has vowed 'not to repeat' his mother's strategy of making her private life a public event. At the same time, he has been quietly supportive of his mother. Initially, he concedes, 'I was definitely like, "Oof, too much information for me."' But now he's got used to it. After all his mother always sought attention. 'She would show up at report day at my school, where parents have to go in and get the report card, in a purple beaver-skin Zandra Rhodes coat. And I'd be like, "Mom, you know, can't you just like wear tweed or something? Just like, tone it down?" And now I'm very happy and proud that she doesn't, and she's completely unique.'

Now Vanderbilt is planning a follow-up. She hasn't sat down to write it, and probably won't until new ideas and feelings line up. But this may not be a long wait; after all, she says: 'I find sex endlessly interesting. I suppose I always will.'